Is There A Chapter Missing, Bill?

By Chris Taylor

Whether you're a fan of his work or consider him a little too gauche, you can't deny that Bill Gates likes to use broad brush strokes. Business @ the Speed of Thought is full of them: How he turned Microsoft around like a supertanker on a dime and pointed it toward the Internet in late 1995. How a plague of paper records at his Redmond, Wash., headquarters was all but eradicated under his guidance. And so on. But the boldest, broadest stroke of all is this: at a time when the Justice Department appears likely to pop the software Goliath one on the chin, Gates studiously manages to keep mum on the ongoing antitrust trial. Not one peep of anger, frustration or resignation is allowed to pass his literary lips.

Doubtless this is simply practical professionalism from the world's richest executive, a man with an almost Clinton-like ability to compartmentalize. Still, it leaves us in a quandary. When we last saw Bill Gates, as a fuzzy image on a videotaped deposition, he appeared surly and arrogant. He followed each question with a lengthy silence, denied knowledge of e-mails he had written and professed not to understand words like "market share," "concerned" or "ask." He was, in other words, one of the most potent weapons in the government's armory.

Now Bill the tousle-haired billionaire is back, bursting with business advice and all the exuberance of a boy genius. Sun, Apple, IBM and Intel are merely examples of companies that use digital nervous systems. You'd never guess they also play a major part in the feds' case. "Trial" to this Gates means nothing more than putting a new software product through its paces.

What is the world to think of this Jekyll-and-Hyde performance? Take, for example, the sage advice from Gates the author, who exhorts us to appreciate less-than-salutary tidings. "I have a natural instinct for hunting down grim news," he writes. "If it's out there, I want to know about it. The people who work for me have figured this out."

Such diktats, however, do not seem to apply to the DOJ suit, potentially the grimmest piece of news Microsoft has received in its 24-year existence. "This antitrust thing will blow over," a lackadaisical Gates told Intel executives back in 1995. When the government's complaint finally hit his desk in 1998, according to his own testimony, the software titan refused to read a word of it. Given the chance to reassess his videotaped Q. and A. in the light of its disastrous courtroom debut, CEO Gates conceded only that he should have "smiled a bit." As Gates the author would have told him: "A CEO avoiding bad news is the beginning of the end."

If there ever was a time for Microsoft employees to slap their boss with a reality check, this is it. The antitrust trial is on a six-week hiatus. Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson urged the two sides to come up with a settlement in the interim. Intel settled its suit with the FTC last week before the case even went to court, sidestepping the kind of white-hot publicity that has roasted Microsoft. And yet the only word to come out of Redmond is a leaked memo from Microsoft lawyer David Heiner to the executive team. Shunning all evidence to the contrary--including Judge Jackson's stern admonitions and chief prosecutor David Boies' demolition of defense witnesses--Heiner insists that the government's case is a house of cards built on "various random incidents or pieces of e-mail." Bad news, it seems, will have to wait a little longer.

Are the two faces of Gates irreconcilable? Not entirely. Both are in love with e-mail, even though one has been publicly burned by his. In this antitrust case, Gates' In and Out boxes are the nearest things to a smoking gun, as far as the feds are concerned. Among their favorite extracts: "Winning Internet browser share is very important to us," "Do we have a clear plan on what we want Apple to do to undermine Sun?" and "I think there is a very powerful deal of some kind we could do with Netscape."

You might think a man who has had his company e-mail captured by the government, read aloud in a courtroom and printed around the world would be put off electronic messaging for life. But Gates the author adores the medium. His ideal business model has management inundating its underlings with e-mails in a free-and-easy manner that would give some corporate lawyers a heart attack. "There's no doubt that e-mail flattens the hierarchical structure of an organization," he writes. "It encourages people to speak up."

As an article of faith, it's touching. As a core principle of the wired age--the free-flow of information--it's the one thing that holds our vision of this complex character together. And if it doesn't always work out in reality as Gates the author imagines it will--if Gates the defendant doesn't much resemble the portrait he painted in those bold brush strokes--that's hardly surprising. Few of us ever do.